The Second Sight, page 29
8
IN TIFAWT, AQUARTER OF A CENTURY LATER, WOLKOWICZ SAID, “SO what’s the rest of the story?”
“You know the rest,” Lla Kahina replied. “Lori disappeared.”
“Not for another two years. What happened in the meantime?”
“Heydrich got worse. It was like a game of dolls—sit here, wear that, say this, eat some more pastries. Sometimes he’d ask me to read the cards.”
“What did you see?”
“I always told him he was going to rule over a kingdom in the east. That was what he wanted to hear.”
“You were right. Hitler made him Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. To all intents and purposes he was king of Czechoslovakia.”
“That was after my time in Germany. Lori and Hubbard got me out of the country in 1939—took me to Denmark on the Mahican.”
“How could they get away with that without Heydrich knowing it? He ran the whole Nazi secret police operation.”
“I think he did know. He had that man Stutzer in Rügen to watch the Christophers, but Stutzer never tried to prevent them from sailing. He’d search the boat after they got back and make accusations, but that was all. I think Heydrich wanted them to commit these crimes. It gave him power over Lori. If she didn’t do as he wanted he could put Hubbard in prison—kill him, even. He had the power of life and death over everyone in Germany.”
“Did he really think you were a Jew?”
“What did it matter? I was just part of the decor. It was Lori who fascinated him because she was so far above him. He was hypnotized by that nude drawing that Zaentz made of her when she was pregnant with Paul. He’d come and look at it when Hubbard wasn’t there. One day he came in disguise when Hubbard was there.”
“In disguise?”
“Gray wig, beard, even a false nose. He said he was the Reich Inspector of Paintings. He made a terrible scene, shouting at Hubbard. ‘Why do you have all these Jewish paintings?’ he said. ‘Look, you let a Jew draw a picture of your wife in the nude! All this shit will be confiscated and burned!’ But he loved the picture. ‘I must have it!’ he’d say to Lori. ‘If I took it your husband would find out about us. But if I confiscate it …’ ”
“Hubbard never suspected any of this?”
“Why should he? They loved each other.”
“But she let this happen.”
“What was she supposed to do about it? Hubbard and Paul were Heydrich’s hostages.”
“There was more to it than that.”
“That’s possible,” Lla Kahina said.
Twilight was falling. Next door, the muezzin called the salat al-maghrib.
“The only thing the Christophers took with them besides their clothes when they finally tried to get out of Germany was that drawing of Lori,” Lla Kahina said. “The Gestapo confiscated it when they arrested Lori. It was never seen again. Neither was she.”
Lla Kahina saw someone behind Wolkowicz and smiled. She opened her arms in a gesture of love. Zarah Christopher came into the courtyard and kissed the old woman on the cheeks. Lla Kahina took her onto her lap and stroked her thick blond hair.
“Who, Nanna?” Zarah asked.
“La belle dame sans peur,” Lla Kahina said. “The beautiful lady who wasn’t afraid of anything.”
9
WOLKOWICZ DEPARTED THE NEXT DAY AT DAWN. NERVOUSLY, CATHY gave her permission for Zarah to ride with him toward the mountains as far as the Ja’wabi date tree.
“Just remember your promise,” Cathy said to Wolkowicz. “Not a word about Paul and the rest of them.”
“Okay,” Wolkowicz replied. “But I don’t know what you’re so worried about. He’s gone, sweetheart. The kid will never lay eyes on him.”
“You’re sure of that? They’d find each other if they knew about each other. Nothing ever stopped Paul, and she’s just like him.”
“What if they did? They’re father and daughter. Are you jealous of your own kid?”
“I want her to be happy, that’s all. I want her to be free. There’s a curse on the Christophers.”
“Okay. I’ll keep it impersonal.”
Until now Wolkowicz had not mentioned Christopher’s name to Zarah. It was not necessary. Wolkowicz was the one who had informed her, in the first words he spoke in her presence, that her father existed. Thereafter, as he confided the details to Cathy and Lla Kahina he relied on the child’s ingenuity.
Just after dawn they dismounted—Zarah from her mare, Wolkowicz from his donkey—and ate their breakfast beneath the date tree. The village lay below them, mica walls scattering the rays of the early morning sun. In the other direction the snowy peaks of the Idáren Dráren caught the same horizontal light. If Wolkowicz appreciated this unique spectacle, he gave no sign.
“I think you should learn Chinese,” he said.
“Chinese? What for?”
“You may have to go to China someday.”
“Why?„
“Who knows? To visit relatives, maybe.”
Zarah was peeling an orange, turning it against the knife so as to make a long continuous spiral of the skin. She finished what she was doing, divided the orange in two, and shared it with Wolkowicz. He ate it slowly, section by section, then took the child’s hands in his.
“Time to say goodbye,” he said. “Before I leave I want you to know that I came here to see you, nobody else. I did it because I knew I could trust you to remember something. I’m your father’s friend. Whatever you may hear in the future, whatever other people may try to tell you, that’s the truth. Remember that. When you see him, and I know you’re going to find him someday, tell him what I told you.”
He released her hands. “Open the book I gave you to page one hundred,” he said. Zarah did so and found a brand-new American hundred dollar bill. Wolkowicz said, “Tear it in half.” Without hesitation Zarah folded the crisp banknote in half, creased it, and tore it neatly along the seam. “Keep half and give me the other half,” Wolkowicz said. Once again Zarah obeyed.
“Don’t lose your half,” Wolkowicz said. “Someday somebody may give you the other half. If it matches, you’ll know that whoever gives it to you is your father’s friend, just like I am, and that I told that person something I want you to know—something that’s important to your father. Even if I’m dead, whatever the person with the other half of the hundred tells you comes straight from me. Got it?”
Zarah nodded.
“Good,” Wolkowicz said. He gave her a boost onto her horse, and when she looked down from the saddle into his broad homely face, he grinned at her.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “I’m counting on you.”
INTERLUDE
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
“THE O.G. LIVES IN THE FUTURE,” PATCHEN SAID. “ALL GREAT PRACtical jokers do. He can’t wait for Sis to find the frog in her bed or the pan of water balanced on the door to spill on Cousin Oscar’s head. That’s why he likes your idea—it’s a terrific prank.”
“But you don’t like it,” Christopher said.
“I didn’t say that,” Patchen replied. “But it doesn’t answer what you say is the important question: ‘Why?’ “
“No. All it does is put you in a position to ask the question of somebody who knows the answer.”
They were walking home together after Patchen’s birthday supper. They had stayed late at the O. G.’s, trapped by his enthusiasm for Christopher’s idea.
The O. G., who had always insisted that all good ideas can be expressed in a single sentence, was captivated by the simplicity of the plan: get the kidnapper out in the open by isolating him on a single target. “That’s the stuff!” he had cried. “Tie up the goat in the moonlight, climb the tree, wait for the tiger to come.”
Now, walking past the hushed mansions of the 0. G.’s hidden neighborhood, Patchen discussed the proposal more calmly. “How, exactly, do we lead the enemy to the target of our choice?” he asked.
“By removing every target except the one you want him to hit,” Christopher replied.
“I understand the principle,” Patchen said. “But you’re talking about a lot of people. We have stations, bases, and deep-cover operations in every country in the world. Tell me more details.”
Christopher did so, tersely: clear the embassies of Outfit people, break contact with every agent in the world, explain nothing, create unbearable curiosity. Then put somebody out in the open—one in each danger zone, the Middle East, Europe, Washington—and wait for the kidnappers to strike.
“You mean bait the trap with real Outfitters who know real secrets?”
“They’d have to be genuine to stand up under the drug. But they don’t have to be in on the details. You’d falsify them—give them something to confess that they believed was true, something” … he spoke the next words in an imitation of the 0. G.’s ardent tones … “that would keep the tiger’s attention on the goat until Jim Corbett got in his shot.”
Patchen was not amused. “You mean lie to our own people, set them up?”
Christopher did not bother to smile. “If you want them to lie effectively under this drug,” he said, “they will have to believe that they’re telling the truth.”
“The voice of experience,” Patchen said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Wasn’t that what happened in China? Didn’t you hold out under their interrogation till the end by telling nothing but the truth, as you knew it?”
Christopher stopped in his tracks. “Yes,” he said. “I never thought of it in quite that way. But that’s what I was doing. Otherwise there would have been no hope.”
“No hope?”
“I thought I was never going to get out,” Christopher said. “If I had lied to please the people who had me in their power, what would I have had left?”
They were in a dense man-made forest in which every grand, sepulchral house stood in a clearing, hidden from its neighbors and disjoined from the life of the city; the silence was eerie—deeper, even, than the silence of Manchuria, where Christopher in his prison cell had always heard the wind blowing or the rain falling or a guard hawking and spitting outside the bars.
After a short pause, only a step or two, Patchen broke the tension with his own little joke about the 0. G. and his mordant opinion, which they both shared, of the double-tongued courtesans of Washington.
“Circumspice,” he said in the old man’s fractured Latin. “Look around you.”
IV
BYGONES
ONE
1
TEN YEARS AFTER PAUL CHRISTOPHER WAS ARRESTED AND IMPRISoned by the Chinese Communists, David Patchen met in Tokyo with a man named Yeho Stern. Patchen had become Director of the Outfit only two weeks before, and this was his first meeting with the head of a foreign intelligence service since his appointment. Yeho Stern did not congratulate Patchen on his promotion. He had no manners in the usual sense of the word; he had stripped his personality and appearance of all bourgeois traits as a matter of ethnic pride and did not want to be mistaken for anything but what he was, a Jew who had, by a miracle, escaped with his life from Christendom and now had the means to defend himself and others against its murderous delusions. To Yeho, courtesy was strictly utilitarian, and its only rule could be expressed in a single sentence: Never do anything that might compromise secrecy. Yeho regarded this encounter, which had been arranged without explanation on short notice, as a breach of etiquette. In more than twenty years of clandestine meetings, he and Patchen had never before met outdoors, let alone in a foreign country inhabited by a different race of people. Even among their own kind they were a noticeable pair: Yeho was a stout but very short man, almost a midget, while Patchen stood over six feet high and looked even taller because he was so gaunt.
Now they stood side by side on the Full-Moon Bridge of the Korakuen Garden in central Tokyo. It was very early in the morning on a cold, smoggy day, but the park was already full of Japanese. Tame carp hung in the murky water beneath the bridge, waiting to be fed. Yeho did not look down at the gold and silver fishes, some of them older than the oldest living human being; they were irrelevant. Sound carried over still water. That was relevant.
“Why did you choose this place for a meeting?” he asked, looking around him in all directions before he spoke and then barely voicing the words.
“I wanted to talk to you before you left for China tomorrow,” Patchen said.
Despite the clammy archipelagic weather, Yeho wore his Jerusalem clothes: a short-sleeved shirt that exposed his stubby, muscular arms, rumpled cotton trousers, sandals, no necktie. He always wore sandals; he did not own a necktie, and it was said that he did not even know how to tie one. He was called Yeho by his equals, never Stern, which wasn’t his name in any case, but the shortened form of the name his family had been given in 1787 when Austria passed a law requiring all Jews living within its borders to adopt Germanized surnames. Prosperous families were named for jewels (Rubin) or flowers (Rosen) or for admirable traits such as honesty (Ehrlich). Most ordinary people, who could not pay bribes, were given one of four utilitarian names derived from their appearance: Schwarz (black), Weiss (white), Klein (little), Gross (big). The wretched were saddled with jokes as names. Yeho’s ancestor, a tanner who reeked of puer, the solution of hot water and dog dung in which animal hides were steeped after being treated with lime, had been entered on the rolls as Hundsstern, or “dog star.”
On arrival in Palestine Yeho shortened it to Stern, a resonant name in the story of the creation of the Jewish state. In his own organization, and within the Outfit, where Yeho had many admirers but few acquaintances, he was called the Memuneh, the Big Boss. This did not offend his otherwise invincible modesty.
In order to look into Patchen’s face without straining his neck, Yeho had to stand several steps away. He had large translucent ears, and because he was standing with his back to the morning sun, they glowed bright pink.
“So,” he said. “Speak.”
Patchen said, “I want to do the Chinese a favor.”
Yeho clucked his tongue. “Another one?”
In China, where Americans had been forbidden to tread for more than twenty years, Yeho was welcome as an honest broker. In addition to the business he carried out in the name of his own service, he had also done many favors on Patchen’s behalf. These had usually taken the form of small but valuable gifts that were useful to the Chinese in their operations against their archenemy, Soviet Russia—a piece of hardware, a scrap of information that completed a puzzle, a timely warning. Yeho had never asked for anything in return for these benefices, but after delivering them he always inquired, discreetly, about the American prisoner, Paul Christopher, so that the Chinese would understand where the favor really came from.
So far they had shown no sign that they would ever let Christopher go; in their penal methods, the Chinese placed great emphasis on remorse, confession, and reform, but Christopher refused to admit his crimes against China. Unless he confessed and apologized, they explained, he was doomed.
On the Full-Moon Bridge in Tokyo, Patchen looked into Yeho Stern’s upturned face and said, “I want to give them Butterfly.”
“Give them Butterfly?”
Yeho threw up his stubby arms in disbelief and turned his back.
Butterfly was the cryptonym by which Patchen and Yeho, and two or three others, knew an operative of the Russian intelligence service—they called it that, or the RIS, never “the Soviet intelligence service” or “the KGB,” because in their opinion there was no such thing as the Soviet Union, only the Russian empire operating under an assumed name.
For the past year and a half Yeho and Patchen and a very small group of people from their two organizations had been paying close attention to Butterfly. He came to their attention after he managed the assassination or kidnapping of half a dozen agents of the People’s Republic of China in Europe and Africa. On the surface, these were senseless operations. The victims were doing the Russians no harm, and even if the opposite had been true, it is seldom good practice for an intelligence service to kill an enemy it knows, because the victim will only be replaced by one that it does not know and must therefore identify and neutralize at great expense in time, manpower, and money.
It was the very pointlessness of these operations that aroused Patchen’s curiosity: if there was no apparent purpose to an act, it followed that there must be a hidden purpose. In order to discover what the RIS’s secret motive was, he set up a team to watch Butterfly, putting Horace Hubbard, Paul Christopher’s younger cousin, in charge of this operation. Patchen trusted Horace absolutely on the basis of his bloodlines, but he was qualified in other ways, too: after leading a Marine rifle platoon in Korea he had concentrated in Chinese at Yale and later learned Arabic while working for the Outfit in the Middle East. He had worked for Barney Wolkowicz in Vietnam, where he mastered Vietnamese and was the last American known to have seen Christopher before he vanished into China. Horace had a flair for dangerous operations, and because he spoke so many Oriental languages he was credited with understanding the Eastern mind. He put together a group that included several American Chinese, with a sprinkling of Chinese refugees from Vietnam, and with the help of an Outfit computer expert, targeted the Chinese missions in Europe whose intelligence officers were most likely to be hit next.
